They say you gain weight after you get married. I think it's true. Ask my wife Michelle. She gained about 10lbs. She still looked great but she wasn't comfortable with herself.
Now being a trainer and a husband, I can't do both. I can only do one. So I was her husband, being her trainer and husband with be a terrible idea and I WOULD NOT recommend it.
Then at her work, they started a contest. A fitness contest. Who could get the most fit in 6 weeks. Actually her boss is one of my clients so he is always running contests like these to motivate his employees to stay in shape. How this one ran was that, everyone had to set their own personal goal. Not who could lose the most compared to others, but you set your own goal and people bet against you. If your goal was really hard people bet more money, if it was easy they bet less or none at all. And if you didn't hit your goal, you would be the person paying everyone out. If you made it, they would pay you what they bet. And you can bet on others as well. Michelle picked a really hard one. 12lbs in 6 weeks and lowering her body fat down to 20%.
6 weeks was a long time so I thought she would be fine. Then she got sick! Not just sick, she had a staph infection! She wasn't supposed to sweat at all. She was on really strong anti-biotics for weeks. When she was finally rid of her staph infection and cleared to work out, she had 2 weeks left. And if she lost she would be forking out 300 dollars!
So we created a plan. It was pretty basic. We changed her diet to mostly raw vegetables and grilled meats. We timed some of her meals and as we got closer to the weigh in day, we kept changing her meal times. We eliminated certain foods as we progressed. Lots of water then even with the water intake we started to time it. At the beginning we zero cardio but then increased it to really intense cardio in the middle and then very light cardio at the end. She did 12 day strength progression series. Very similar to what we did for Shaya.
I didn't actually train her, I just told her what I would do if I was her. She knew all the exercises already so she didn't need coaching for that. She was already good on how to eat, she just needed it to be stricter. I just wrote up a plan and she did it.
But she took photos of herself every day, she wrote down everything she ate, she wrote down all her workouts including her numbers and rests between sets, and she tracked her measurements daily. That was all her. I asked her why she was doing it, and she said it helps her stay focused. So it might be something other people might use as well. At AOE we track all the client progress but it might be good for people training at home.
These were her stats on Day 1 of the last 14 days:
Age: 25
Height: 5'6
Weight: 130
Body Fat: 27%
BMI: 21
Muscle Mass: 31.3%
These were her stats on Day 14 of 14:
Age: 25
Height: 5'6
Weight: 117
Body Fat: 19.7%
BMI: 18.9
Muscle Mass: 34.3%
She actually ended up losing 13lbs not 12 and lowered her body fat below the 20% goal. She also in the meanwhile increased her muscle mass and found some abs while she was at it!
I know people will read this trying to figure out what the magic secret was. And people will sell DVDs and books and pills and supplements saying that was the magic. The real magic in all those situations was the diligence of the person. It's what we work on at All Out Effort and keep hammering into everyone's head. Its not something we can create a DVD or supplement or even sell. It's not glamorous but that's always the difference between the person wanting to make change and the person who does make change.
They aren't doing those workouts or on some diet because it has some magic power to it. Them doing it is just a testament to their diligence and unless you can't replicate that diligence, you will never replicate those results. Writing down everything you eat and do? That's diligence. Working out on vacations? Diligence. Saying no thank you on special occasions? Those are the differences. Every success story is a story about someone doing something everyone else was unwilling to do. Start with your mindset before trying to fix your body.
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Can you tell us what your work outs consisted of?!
ReplyDeleteI would love to know what your diet consisted of for those 14 days... My work out is very intense cardio and I feel like I have hit a plateau and am not continuing any progress. Please if you have any nutritional suggestions let me know. Thanks
ReplyDelete@anon
ReplyDeleteIf you want to beat the plateau you might want to consider minimalizing the amount of carbs (especially sugars) from your diet.
Also make sure to spread out your meals during the day; instead of 3 normal meals, make it 6small ones.
Furthermore you need to drink water like a camel!! The more the better, I sometimes find myself drinking up to 3.5Liters a day!
Also try not to eat anything before you go to sleep, unless it is high in protein. (Yoghurt, milk, low fat chicken, protein shakes) This to prevent loss of lean muscle tissue.